Morality's Dependence on God

A short essay written for Saints, Heretics, and Atheists: An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. The essay discusses the age old question of whether the existence of objective morality is dependent on the existance of God (in a classical sense).

Prompt

It is sometimes suggested that God is necessary for morality, that “without God everything is permitted.” For this writing assignment, watch the debate between Prof. Louis Anthony and Prof. William Lane Craig available here:

In your essay, give one reason for thinking that God is or is not necessary for morality. Raise a worry for your position. Briefly argue that that worry can be met or is otherwise inconclusive.

Morality’s Dependence on God

There is an ongoing debate in philosophy regarding the relationship between God and morality, especially regarding whether the existence of God is necessary for morality to exist. At first glance, this issue may seem to sharply divide theists and atheists, but there are many theists who believe and argue that morality can exist independently of God. In this paper, I will examine a version of the argument Professor Antony uses in her debate with Professor Craig and illustrate that the argument, which is based on a dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro, successfully argues against some conceptions of God but does not give a firm conclusion to the entire issue.

Before examining Professor Antony’s argument, the terms morality and God should be defined fairly. Morality is defined as the mechanism or set of standards that determines goodness or badness. God is defined to be the greatest thing that can be imagined. Thus, in order for God to be necessary for morality, God must be currently necessary to the mechanism or set of standards that determines good and bad. Therefore, it is not enough to argue that God created the set of moral standards because this opens the door to the possibility that morality could continue to exist even if God were to cease to exist after creating it.

Professor Antony’s argument draws on a dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro. Like Socrates, Antony argues that if God is good, God may be good because God’s actions are good. However, God’s actions are merely examples of good and not essential to the mechanism or set of standards by which those actions were judged to be good. On the other hand, God may be essential to morality because God singlehandedly determines what is good or bad. That is, God’s judgement is the mechanism that determines an action’s morality. Socrates would take issue with this idea because God must have a method for judging an action’s morality. Thus, God would still be independent of the set of standards God uses to judge an action’s morality. As noted previously, simply saying that God created the set of standards with which God uses to judge an action’s morality is insufficient to demonstrate an essential dependence between God and morality.

There are many possible objections to and worries about the argumentation Socrates and Professor Antony uses. It is certainly true that this account is not a positive account of morality, were it to exist independently of God. The argument is a rejection of two possible conceptions tying together God and morality. It does not prove that it is impossible for God and morality to be essentially dependent. One alternative possibility is that God is morality. As opposed to saying that God judges actions on the basis of some standards, one could say that God is the set of standards. This is not an unreasonable argument, as philosophers such as Augustine have suggested that God be akin to reason or similar conceptions. By defining God to be morality, this creates an essential dependence between God and morality. After all, if one supposes that God were not to exist, this would also suppose that morality also does not exist. This line of reasoning is a difficult one to argue against because it seems true by definition. It is as if someone defined a triangle to have three sides and argued that if triangles did not exist, something with three sides did not exist. This is certainly true, but the argument is not necessarily meaningful to those who use other, more common, definitions of morality and God.

In order for this argument to hold meaning for those people, one would need to demonstrate that God, defined to be the set of moral standards, must also possess the other properties attributed to God. For instance, they would need to demonstrate an essential dependence between being the set of moral standards and being omniscient. Because I have no argument that these qualities cannot be essentially dependent, I believe that the issue cannot yet be concluded completely and is left open for debate. Thus, Professor Antony and Socrates have limited the scope of relationships God can have with morality if morality were to be essentially dependent on God.

Chaney’s Feedback

Areas for Improvement:

1. Even though I like the clarity of the introduction (as mentioned above), it doesn’t explain how you’re going to address all three aspects of the prompt. The prompt asks you to give some reason for or against the idea that God is necessary for morality (1), raise a worry for that position (2), and then respond to that worry (3). You say you’re going to illustrate that Antony’s argument that God is not necessary for morality is successful. That seems to address (1), but when you say that the argument “does not give a firm conclusion to the entire issue” I don’t know if that relates to (2) or (3). In the future, make sure your introduction doesn’t just state some of what you’re going to argue (address some of the prompt), but all of it.
2. Related to the foregoing point, the overall paper could have been structured in a way that neatly reflects the three parts of the prompt and your discussion of each of them. The three ideas you convey, I take it, are: (a) that God is independent of morality in the sense that his will does not make things morally good or bad (rather, things are morally good or bad independently of his will); (b) maybe morality is dependent on God in the sense that morality is identical to God; (c) it’s not so plausible to say morality is identical to God, because then you would need to show that morality (or the moral principles that make up morality) are omniscient, omnipotent and have the other attributes that we traditionally ascribe to God. Is that the structure? If so, it would have been super helpful for the paper to be organized in such a way that makes that structure really evident. For instance, you could have had three body paragraphs. The first could have been about (a), the second about (b) and the third about (c). For as it stands, I have to, as it were, do a lot of digging and excavating in order to extract the important points.